An online project curated for the Xth Biennale de Lyon.

The sixth episode of Tactical Networks & Simulations is an audiovisual interview I have done through Skype with Wafaa Bilal.

Bilal is an Iraqi American artist, a former professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a current assistant professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He works with photography, video, computer games and the Internet. He has travelled and lectured extensively to inform audiences of the situation of Iraqi people, and the importance of peaceful conflict resolution.

The current interview focuses mainly on his project entitled The Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi. The work is conceived as the third version of an existing video game titled Quest for Saddam, a first-person shooter developed and published by Petrilla Entertainment in 2003. In this original version, the players got to kill identical Iraqis and hunt down the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

Three years later, a new version of the game appeared on the Internet: The Night of Bush Capturing was a spin-off produced by Al Qeada, which added a new “skin” to the existing game in order to reverse the roles of the hunter and the hunted. In this second version, the players got to kill identical Americans and hunt down the 43^rd U.S. President George W. Bush. Suddenly, a game designed to show a compatriotic reaction to the 9/11 events and the 2003 invasion of Iraq shifted to its antithesis by changing into an on-line propaganda distributed for the “terrorist children”.

In 2008, Bilal produced a third version by hacking Al Qaeda’s production and casting himself - a faculty member at the Art Institute of Chicago who lost his father and brother in the Iraq war - as a virtual suicide bomber who gets sent to a mission to assassinate the former U.S. President. Through the lens of an “dynamic” simulation, Virtual Jihadi aims to point at the vulnerability of Iraqi civilians.

The first public presentations of the work generated manifestations and as a result, two exhibitions have been shut down in the city of Troy, New York. This situation produced an important free speech controversy and stimulated different reflections on the power of representation.

Another remarkable project mentioned during the interview is Domestic Tension. This month-long piece involved Bilal living in a gallery in Chicago, eating and drinking what was donated to him. He was placed on the receiving end of a paint-ball gun that was accessible online, 24 hours a day. In order to document the work, Bilal published daily reports relating different “stories” on YouTube.

Domestic Tension skillfully reproduced the tensions of a conflict zone within the frame of a comfort zone. The piece drew the attention of the press: Newsweek called the project “breathtaking” while the Chicago Tribune described the piece as “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time”. By the end of the project, Bilal had been shot at over 80,000 times by people from 130 countries.

The fifth episode of Tactical Networks & Simulations is an e-mail interview I have done with Sepideh Saremi.

Saremi is born in Hamburg, raised in Los Angeles, and studied writing at the University of Southern California. Besides being the editor of Pars Arts since 2006, she works as a content development manager at a new media studio and a freelance journalist who has been writing about books, food and technology.

Pars Arts is an English-language blog focusing on Iranian diaspora culture. As a continuation of last week’s episode about Iranians’ Blogs, this episode takes time to clearly focus on the concept of diaspora and its artistic and cultural productions.

Tolga Taluy
First of all, I would like to start by mentioning the subtitle of Pars Arts: “Iranian Culture and Identity, Abroad”. As you also mention on your personal website Pars Arts clearly focuses on the Iranian diaspora culture. I believe the concept of diaspora is something very complex. What would be your subjective interpretation of this term?

Sepideh Saremi
To me, “diaspora” are people who have their cultural roots somewhere other than the place in which they are now settled. I think this applies not just to immigrants, but often to their children or their children’s children - people who may never have set foot in the place they say they come from (which applies to me). For me, it has a lot to do with perceiving yourself as culturally and geographically displaced, a kind of feeling of being unsettled or a little but unmoored. If you have to think about your culture or explain it to other people, you’re probably part of a diaspora.

TT
In your opinion, why is the definition of diaspora usually considered to be something which generates endless arguing and quarrels?

SS
I don’t know if this is necessarily true. Within diaspora groups, there are certainly arguments, but I am not sure it’s about the definition of diaspora… Some Iranian diaspora spend a lot of time arguing over (what I consider) quite trivial things - like whether the name of our language is “Persian” or “Farsi,” or if it’s okay to self-identify as “Persian” rather than “Iranian”. Frankly, I’ve never cared about these things. But I haven’t heard many people quarreling about the definition of “diaspora.”

TT
In your opinion, is it possible to talk about a diasporic genre in art and/or culture? What would be the specificities of such a genre other than the geographical borders?

SS
Yes, I think it’s definitely possible to talk about a specific genre - I think it’s pretty interesting to try to define it’s specifications, actually. Has someone done this already? I am no art historian or curator but some of the things I’ve been seeing in Iranian diaspora expressions are similar in tone and mood - there’s a lot of longing, displacement, nostalgia, sadness, and, within the last few years, often a lot of humor, too.

TT
What is your actual relationship with Iran?

I have never been to Iran, nor have I met most of my relatives that live in Iran. I was born to Iranian immigrant parents in Germany, in the early 1980s, when it was not a very immigrant-friendly place, and raised in Los Angeles during the 1990s. L.A. is home to one of the largest populations of Iranians outside of Iran, so I was lucky to be surrounded by a lot of Persian culture and language when I was growing up, but I really took it for granted until I was much older.
To say I have a relationship with Iran would be a stretch, but there’s definitely a very emotional connection I feel with Iranian-ness, whatever that is - sometimes those emotions are really positive, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes my interactions with Iranians in Iran, or Iranians who are very recent immigrants from Iran, make me think that members of various diasporas can have more in common with each other than they do with people who are in or from their country of origin.

TT
Are there any particular links the Internet allowed you to create with Iran?

SS
I think the Internet has been really helpful to me because it’s allowed me to educate myself about Iran by reading blogs, looking at people’s travel pictures, and finding out about films and art that deal with Iran. And it’s really the place where I pieced together my knowledge of Iranian history and all the complicated geopolitics. This has all helped me create a more informed image of Iran and also see what Iranians outside of Iran are creating, and that many of them are thinking about and struggling with identity and belonging in ways that resonate with me.
Through Pars Arts, I’ve been lucky to build a very small network of peers that live there or go to Iran often, but most of my links are with other Iranians who live abroad, most of them in America. I feel very uncomfortable with identifying myself just as an Iranian because I feel like it would be phony of me.

TT
Precisely speaking, how are the “new” means of information and communication (blogs, social networks, etc.) influencing the diaspora of today?

SS
I think new forms of web-based communication help forge community and communication with the country of origin, and that can be a very powerful thing. I think it can help diaspora feel a little less displaced, and also connect them with each other. And as I’ve said, I think reading and seeing real accounts of people’s travels can also help in providing a more nuanced image of the place your family comes from.

As the fourth episode of Tactical Networks & Simulations, I would like to introduce an e-mail interview I’ve done with Fariborz Shamshiri.

Shamshiri is an Iranian journalist who writes about Iran’s social issues and political news principally through Rotten Gods. As he mentioned in one of our previous correspondences, he defines himself as a “perpetual student who never gets old because of his curiosity”. He is also the administrator of an open directory project titled Iranians’ Blogs which aims to list all English blogs maintained by Iranians. The idea is quite simple: if you are an Iranian, have a blog in English and would like to be listed in the directory, all you have to do is to send an e-mail to Shamshiri with your link and your current location.

The directory makes clear distinction between bloggers inside of Iran and bloggers outside of Iran by proposing two different sections. It also displays a live feed generated from blogs appearing in the directory on the right side.

After sending my interview proposition to Shamshiri, I’ve received this answer:

Dear Tolga Taluy,

Thank you for your proposition and I am flattered but I don’t know what to say.

This is very small project and we have long way to go.

If you think so the interview is helpful to your project too, I will be glad to participate otherwise I am not into interviews.

Also, I like to know, why Iranians’ Blogs is interesting for you? What makes it interesting in your opinion?

Yours sincerely,

Fariborz

Therefore, we started this interview in reverse, as it follows:

Tolga Taluy
In my opinion, Iranians’ Blogs is interesting, because it is all about structuring existing information by building a database. One of the structural propositions would be to build a directory. In your case, the open directory as a public project seems to be a pertinent proposition. It gets expanded because people want to take part in the project. The layout is quite simple. You divide blogs in two categories: bloggers inside of Iran and bloggers outside of Iran. There is also a live feed displaying the most recent posts from blogs listed on the page. One of the things I enjoy about this project is the eclecticism of present blogs. Iranians’ Blogs can also be considered as a contemporary metaphor for Aesop’s “United we stand, divided we fall” in a country where freedom of speech, amongst other things, is a delicate matter. Now it is your turn, if you will. What would be your description of the project?

Fariborz Shamshiri
This project is a simple directory of English blogs written by Iranians inside and outside of Iran. The interesting part of this project is to provide a platform for different opinions of our society. Keep in mind that most Iranian bloggers are liberal and favoring secular government and also there are some religious and pro-government bloggers too.

TT
You also mention that it is currently a very small project and you have a long way to go - what would be the ideal scale for such a project?

FS
My ideal project would be something that covers whole Iranian blogs with different languages, a live translated feed of Persian language blogs and some neat features that would connect Persian language bloggers with their counterparts in other countries and languages.

TT
In your opinion, what is the need to show diverging reflections in a same place?

FS
I wanted to show what it is out there, in reality and this directory is all about that. It is a collection of everyone voices from anti-government to pro-government bloggers. I think so it is very important to show different voices can coexist and have discourses on issues at hand in one place while there is no totalitarian regime rule over us. Indeed, we can have this kind of approach in our country.

TT
What kind of differences do you see between different languages when they relate the same event?

FS
There are many differences between different languages when they relate the same event because it is just not about language, there are many factors included like culture, perspective, education, perception and trust me sometime you read one story in different languages from different cultures and I shock to see how they think and what part of story they have covered that I couldn’t even imagine about it.

TT
As you describe the ideal form of Iranians’ Blogs, I spontaneously ask myself if it isn’t dangerous to build up a digital monopoly?

FS
Monopoly is dangerous but in this case, the users decide what to do and what to read. So I can say there wouldn’t be monopoly when users run and manage the system by their choices somehow.

TT
If we summarize the process, users who are willing to take part in this project send you their links through e-mail and you add their blogs to the directory by providing the same service to everyone. I have two complementary questions concerning the methodology. On one hand, I wonder how the visitors can be sure your choices are completely objective and transparent? On the other if you don’t take any social or political position through subjective moderation, how can you be sure this directory won’t be exploited by anti-governmental or pro-governmental blogs for example?

FS
When we use other directories we are not sure that they are completely objective or transparent either, but we still use them. Most of the blogs in this directory have been out there for couple of years. I periodically review all blogs, specially new ones to make sure everything is going forward smoothly. For the moment, I can still manage all the blogs because there aren’t so many, but in the future we have to come up with an automated process to warn us about suspicious activities. You know visitors are smart people and if you are not neutral, they will notice in a heartbeat and even bloggers would complain. Even though I manage the content, visitors and bloggers take part in it as well and that’s the beauty of it. If one day I exert bias and injustice, I know bloggers and visitors will react immediately and that’s what I like about this particular project.

TT
Before ending this interview, I would like to come back to the idea of trust. You were mentioning that as long as the content is provided by users, there are no risks. But we have some previous examples where this doesn’t work sometimes, especially with Wikipedia for instance. There is a risk even when the information is moderated and I was wondering how can you pretend there is no risk when it is not moderated at all?

FS
I didn’t say there is no risk. I think risk involves in every project including open content projects. Risks in Iranians’ Blogs is different than what Wikipedia has been experiencing there. Probably we get spammed by some people who have specific agendas but because it is not very big project now, it is manageable. So I don’t think it is a big deal with this limited Iranian English bloggers at hand.

Until last year, I was not aware of Hiwa K. I’ve discovered one of his works titled Moon Calendar in The Rest of Now, an exhibition curated by the Raqs Media Collective as a part of Manifesta7 in Ex Alumix, Bolzano/Bozen.

Moon Calendar was a two-screen video installation showing the same performance recorded as a rehearsal in Iraq and as a public event in Germany. During the performance, Hiwa K was trying to tap-dance to his own heartbeat, which was broadcasted through speakers. As the dance was going on, he was losing control over his feet, unable to keep up with his heartbeat after a certain point.

After seeing this piece, I wanted to learn more and I’ve discovered some very interesting propositions such as Cooking with Mama (part 1 & part 2) and Estrangement.

As described in Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance programme by Goldsmith Digital Studios, Cooking with Mama is “a webcast event in which I (Hiwa K) am cooking with friends according to the instructions of my Mother, living in Iraq, who is giving them on a video messenger. The pattern is that she shows and tells what to do, I translate, then we follow her instructions and show the results of all phases of cooking for evaluation. I also introduce my friends to her and translate small conversations between her and my friends. Finally, we eat together.” This event was done for the very first time in 2006, after four years the artist left Iraq. He didn’t see his mother at all during this time period.

The second project I particularly enjoyed is titled Estrangement. As the founders define it, “the concept of Estrangement developed through a series of discussions and collaborative projects between Iraqi artist Hiwa K and Polish curator Aneta Szylak as an attempt to create a form for mutual translation and collaborative work that is not restricted to one cultural format. Estrangement seeks to capture the tension between European cultures and what was once constructed as the “Orient”, investigated from different European cultural contexts of London, Gent and Gdansk, as well as Sulaimany.”

For the third episode of Tactical Networks & Simulations I have decided to ask for an interview with Hiwa K. I found him through Facebook, and sent him a message to see if he were interested in participating in my project. He answered positively and we did an audiovisual chat/interview through Skype. As you may feel while watching the video, the interview ended up being very spontaneous and lasted for more than an hour. We discussed mainly about these two previously mentioned propositions, as well as music, the current social and political situation of Iraq and the use of Internet in a more general way. The online video is an edited proposition.

Hiwa K is a visual artist and musician born in Iraq, living in Germany. His major interest circles around the notion of event, performativity, as well as the figure of the artist as an amateur. Since 2005, he has been developing a series of projects involving paradoxes of cultural competence, participation, dissemination of knowledge and distribution of the event.

The second episode of Tactical Networks & Simulations is an online interview I have done with Warren Sack through e-mail around his project titled Conversation Map.

Sack is a software designer and media theorist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His courses focus on new media art & design and critical studies of new media.

Conversation Map is a graphical browser for very large-scale conversations (VLSCs) that is designed to make it easier for participants to understand and reflect on a wider network of social semantic relations by analyzing several thousands messages at a time belonging to large mailing-lists or busy Usenet newsgroups.

VLSCs are large volumes of public interchanges between the members of a community, taking place across international borders, often on a daily or hourly basis. In “What Does A Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?” Sack points out that “at no other point in history have we had a medium that supports many-to-many communications between hundreds or thousands of people”. VLSCs are important because they take part in the production of new public spaces that may offer the means to reinvigorate public discourse.

The interface of Conversation Map visualizes the activity of a VLSC in four different sections:

• A set of social networks that illustrates who is corresponding to whom.
• A menu of themes of discussion that are important to the conversation embodied in the message.
• A semantic network that articulates some of the emergent synonyms or metaphors of the discussion.
• A graphical representation of all the messages exchanged in the conversation organized into threads over a given period of time.

The latest public version of Conversation Map shows the activity of soc.culture.palestine (a Usenet group devoted to Palestinian people, culture and politics) during the Israel-Gaza Conflict.

Interview

Tolga Taluy
While talking about SimSocrates in your previous interview with Joseph Dumit titled Artificial Participation you were expressing your interest in “designing computer programs that know nothing, have no social position, and yet, simultaneously, might be technologies of the self insofar as they serve as critical mirrors for self reflection”. Can we consider Conversation Map as being a part of this project? If so, isn’t it a risk to not to have a social position for these kinds of works?

Warren Sack
I designed and built the Conversation Map for my Ph.D. work at the MIT Media Lab. Originally, Conversation Map was going to be the “back end” of a bigger system that I had provisionally named SimSocrates. SimSocrates was designed to “listen” to a public discussion, surmise interesting currents, and then intervene by posting Socratic questions in a copular form: e.g., “Are Palestinians Israelis?” To effectively do this I had to build Conversation Map that can find the main themes of discussion and then determine which words are “spoken about” like which other words. The two techniques I employed to do this in the Conversation Map are techniques from the field of computational linguistics: lexical cohesion analysis (applied to the discussion threads to determine the themes of discussion) and automatic thesaurus discovery (applied the the parsed text of the messages). I was having a hard time debugging the code and so I built a graphical interface to the “back end”. This graphical interface is what one can now see as the Conversation Map. In the end, I did in fact write one version of the system that generated Socratic-like questions from the semantic network and discussion themes output by the computational linguistics modules, but, ultimately, the only description of that is the abstract discussion contained in my interview with Joe Dumit.
As I mention in that interview, I was interested in the subject position that has been named sophistic and Socratic in philosophy, the “subject who is supposed to know” in Lacanian psychoanalysis, and just a “nobody” in many other discourses. Despite the multiple names implying that such a position is no subject position at all, I think it is a very specific position; indeed a very risky position. This is the position of the wanderer, the immigrant, the person without connections. Computer scientists have frequently tried to create programs positioned in very powerful positions: the “expert” in expert systems, the “tutor” in intelligent tutoring systems, the “manager” in memory management software, “recommender”, in recommendation systems, etc. In contrast, I was (and still am) interested in the idea of working on ideas from the perspective of people and things which are “not suppose to know” (in the sense that this position has been articulated by theorists of feminist epistemology).

TT
What is your relation with conflict zones such as Albania and Palestine? Why are you interested in using Conversation Map in Usenet groups which is related to conflict zones?

WS
I don’t have any direct, personal relationships at stake in these conflict zones. Anyone who watches television or reads a daily newspapers, nevertheless, has a relationship to these places and people that is mediated through the mainstream media. My interest in looking at these discussions arose from an attempt to find another relation with the conflict zone. The Internet promises a way around the main stream media. I am increasingly skeptical of this promise in its general form. But, if one looks more specifically — at specific websites, specific online discussions, etc. — rather than at the Internet as a whole, then the promise seems more tangible. But, what we are seeing through the lens of Conversation Map — Usenet newsgroups — is not, I think, a space independent of the main stream media.

TT
If you compare the results of soc.culture.albania with soc.culture.palestine almost ten years later, are there any parallels that can be drawn? Are there any recurrent observations which might be context-related?

WS
My current work in this area frequently pays attention to more abstract details of the online exchanges; one might say, I am looking at their “textures”. What is the “shape” of soc.culture.palestine? How does it compare to the “shapes” of other discussions. My colleagues, students and I have found, for example, that political discussions have longer, more complicated threads than technical forums devoted to answering straightforward questions (for obvious reasons). We have also noted that peer-to-peer architectures (like the one underlying the “old” fora of Usenet aka Google Groups, specifically NNTP) provide spaces where people of differing political opinions exchange comments while client-server architectures employed in many contemporary fora (e.g., the architecture of blogs is client-server because they rest on web servers) seem to foster echo chambers of polemics where everyone is simply “speaking” to the converted.
On a more basic level, comparing soc.culture.albania of ten years ago to soc.culture.palestine of today seems to, depressingly, lead one to the conclusion that racism and hate are mainstays of many political exchanges now and then.

TT
Why can’t the viewer easily compare the chronological evolution of the same VLSC through Conversation Map?

WS
For this project, I was interested in a synchronic view of the discussions. One of my former Ph.D. students, Nicolas Ducheneaut, extended Conversation Map to work on Open Source Software design projects (including discussions and code archives) and produced a version that allows one to see a diachronic view of the social networks. Nicolas has that up online here: http://www2.parc.com/csl/members/nicolas/browser.html

TT
In Discipline and Punishement, Michel Foucault uses Bentham’s panopticon as a metaphor for the rise of a society in which all institutions are disciplinary. Control over people can be achieved merely by observing them. I don’t want to be paranoid, but don’t you think Conversation Map can contribute - maybe without meaning it - to a certain panopticism “by having people police themselves because they believe they are being surveyed” (cf. “The Ambiguous Panopticon: Foucault and the Codes of Cyberspace“, Mark Winokur) within a community of interest?

WS
I think we want technologies like Conversation Map for the same reason that we want to see how many other people voted for our candidate when there is an election; and, for the same reason we want to see other people out on the street when we are protesting. How else can one understand oneself as part of a larger “body politic”? Nevertheless, yes, any system that registers the opinion of the body politic might also, potentially, be turned against it as a surveillance technique. In Foucault’s terms, any: “technology of the self” can be turned into a “technology of power” if it falls in the wrong hands. For example, keeping a diary of one’s diet, exercise and health is a good thing to do for one self. But, one would never want such a diary to fall into the hands of an insurance company that might deny one coverage based on, for example, the frequency of one’s consumption of red meat. In Foucault’s terms, this is an issue of “governmentality”: the instruments we need to govern ourselves, democratically, are akin to some of the instruments that a non-democratic form of government might deploy to gain power over our everyday lives. Does this mean we should stop registering to vote or stop protesting on the street? I think not. The best that an artist or designer or engineer can do when they develop one of these instruments is to not work with the people who might abuse it and do work with the people who want to use it for democratic purposes.

TT
In the introduction of “What does a very large-scale conversation looks like?” you were mentioning that “the Internet is engendering the production of new public spaces that may offer the means to reinvigorate public discourse”. Five years later, do you still believe VLSCs have a certain power to stimulate the public discourse or provide spaces where social movements can emerge?

WS
Wikipedia is an example of a public discussion that has yielded something of great value. One might see also the online collaborations of Open Source Software this way too: as public exchanges that have both invigorated public discourse and create new public, common “spaces”. On the other hand, the blogosphere, in general, remains quite polarized politically, at least in the United States: the left neither reads nor links to the blogs of the right and vice versa.

TT
You are also teaching a class titled New forms of democratic participation. Do you believe these forms provide tangible alternatives to existing systems or do they remain theoretical and utopian?

WS
Here is a system put together by two of my former MFA students, Michael Dale and Aphid Stern: metavid. I argue that this is an alternative to C-SPAN, the television broadcast that covers U.S. House and Senate floor proceedings. At this level of detail — when one compares a specific website with a specific television channel, for example — tangible alternatives can be found, or if not found, then designed and built. My students have been successful at this than I have. Most of my software is theoretical, despite my ambitions.

The first simulation I would like to introduce is The road to Bethlehem, a project by BBC Middle East correspondent Aleem Maqbool.

Last Christmas, Maqbool embarked upon a 10-day journey on foot from Nazareth to Bethlehem, intending to replicate the same route of the “nativity” attributed to Mary and Joseph about 2.000 years ago, as according to Luke the Evangelist. As tradition would have it, he was accompanied by a donkey which carried the equipment and the provisions during the 150 km. trek. Besides the length, this journey was a challenge on many levels due to the new obstacles along the way. It routes through areas of continued conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, where army incursions, militancy, and checkpoints manned by soldiers are commonplace.

At the beginning, the diary recording the journey contains brief descriptions. It provides some information about the cities and historical monuments, almost like a travel guide. But as the journey progresses and he meets new people, Maqbool is constantly caught in the crossfire of the past and the present, related through the commentaries of local people: someone is explaining the difference of identity between Arab Israelis and Palestinians in a kebab shop, someone else is telling the story of water in Palestine, the plant life in Al Fara’a or the history of the Jewish settlement of Shilo, another one is sharing the absurdity of bureaucracy in the case of medical emergencies. These narratives are backed up by the everyday life experience of the author. Indeed, he knows something about the absurdity of bureaucracy, since he had to change his donkey 5 times in 10 days because of soldiers at checkpoints telling him the donkey was not having the right papers, and therefore was not allowed to cross the border. Even if the journey was intended as a romantic, almost spiritual one within a complex land, he can’t make an abstraction of the situation when an Israeli military raid happens in a Palestinian village near the border and he decides to make a detour.

In the 1920s there was Kino-Pravda, a newsreel series intended to capture fragments of actuality - the “hidden” truth - in the Soviet Union by Dziga Vertov. Eventually, it evolved to become cinema-vérité 30 years later in France, a style combining naturalistic techniques with cinematic expertise where the camera is no more neutral and is used to provoke subjects. Then, docudrama appeared as a new branch in the middle of the 1960s by introducing the dramatization of actual historical events and projecting alternative propositions based on real facts. These previous propositions can be seen as an heritage in some of the contemporary documentary filmmakers’ works, such as Avi Mograbi who creates a provocation through his presence and his camera, mainly investigating the reality of roadblocks and walls. But it has also certain limits: indeed, the work of Mograbi received critics, especially from the Israeli intellectuals who consider him as a moralist who takes the position of a victim, “as people whose willingness to acknowledge their responsibility makes them morally superior” and uses “the suffering of Palestinians as a backdrop for the demonstration of the consciousness and suffering of those documentarists” in regards to the complex political situation. If this is where Mograbi’s works fail, this is also where Maqbool’s work becomes relevant.

The beauty of it comes from the original idea - the simulation of a holy journey two millennia later by reenacting one of the most well-known scripts of our time. Maqbool’s first concern is neither to complain nor even to provoke any particular situation, but to accomplish his journey in time. This aim gives him the possibility to take some distance. Therefore, relating his own experience becomes a priority. Of course, this induces a part of subjectivity in the narration, something we are not used to read in daily reports published by global news sites. I think that is an interesting attitude which blurs the borders between amateur documents and professional documentaries, leaving the artifacts of journalistic objectivity on the sidelines. The reporter becomes an author who reveals the stories told by the people he met on his way, either citizens or soldiers. In addition, the BBC News network gives him the opportunity to express these impressions to a large public. It also provides a limited participative platform: the readers have the possibility to submit their questions and Maqbool answers some of the “selected” ones during a day. Maqbool hacks - maybe unconsciously - the framework of a large-scale global news network by proposing a paradoxical, subjective yet transparent journalistic point of view which is particularly interesting. Maqbool’s project is important because I believe it is a part of the natural evolution of the documentary style, something one might define as an experience in journal-vérité if such a thing exists.

“A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.” - Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk: How we defeat ourselves by the way we talk and what to do about it, Neil Postman, Delacorte Press, November 1976.

The percentage of internet usage in the Middle East is comparable to the rest of the world: roughly 20% of population is currently connected. If we take a closer look to the statistics, an interesting fact appears promptly: the use growth in this region is tremendous, reaching more than 1100% since 2000. This number represents the biggest use growth in the world during the last few years, closely followed by Africa (approximatively 1000%).

After the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2001, the Web has shifted from version 1.0 to version 2.0 in 2006. It became “an attitude, not a technology” - made possible by the standardization of the systems it preached - based on collaboration (Blogs/CMS), decentralization (BitTorrent) and trust (Wikipedia). To some extent, it realized the concepts expressed by Brecht some 70 years ago.

Talking about the current version, Eric Schmidt once said: “Don’t fight the internet”. Of course, this is kind of obvious: fighting different kinds of media hardly makes sense. Why would someone fight against the newspapers, the radio or even the television?

On the contrary, this statement is quite problematic since it sounds like a cease and desist letter from the same corporations who are currently building these systems. This is the whole paradox of the actual paradigm: while enhancing creativity, participation, sharing, etc. the current version of the Web is putting its public in the role of a simple user, passively fitting into frames and blindly accepting one disclaimer after another without even questioning the hidden tasks the medium might run on the background.

My purpose is not about arguing whether or not this a Manichean choice and the public should make a fair judgement when it comes to take the decision of using the existing systems. In my opinion, it makes more sense to have a clear idea on how and why to use them, or in other words, to have an active and conscious user: the one who employes the available means by hacking or building upon these structures - or proposing constructive attitudes, if you will - to make relevant propositions, not the one who tries to dismantle them.

The Middle East is a global hotspot. As regards the focus brought on this part of the world in my project, the first apparent reason is this massive internet growth within a few years as mentioned above, which seems to catalyse changes in the political and social traditions. I believe these kinds of propositions can be considered as a starting point of legitimate alternatives in a permanently provisional region.

Tactical Networks & Simulations is an ongoing curatorial project started up in the framework of Season 18. Mainly focusing on Iran, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, it aims to share and comment a selection of artistic and theoretical propositions available online.

Rather doing a general report on Manifesta and this year’s edition, I would like to share some thoughts on two different works shown in two separate places during the event. The first one is titled Aquatic Invasion, a sound installation by Thomas Meinecke shown in Fortezza/Franzenfeste as a part of Scenarios, the collaborative project conceived by the three curatorial teams of Manifesta7. The second one is Please join the party by Piratbyrån shown in Ex-Alumix in Bolzano as a part of The Rest of Now exhibition curated by Raqs Media Collective.

Thomas Meinecke is a German DJ, musician and writer born in Hamburg in 1955. Between 1978 and 1986, he contributed to different publications such as the avant-garde magazine Mode und Verzweiflung and the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. In 1986, Suhrkamp Verlag published his first book, a short-story collection titled Der Kirche ums Dorf.

Piratbyrån (the Bureau of Piracy) is defined to be a group of theorists, artists, consultants, activits and pranksters in Index¹, even though they tend to define themselves not as an organization, but as a series of ongoing conversations which bring up different kind of activities since 2003. These conversations are reflections on different topics such as copying, information structure and digital culture. They might be best known for starting up The Pirate Bay, a long-running project of performance art which became the biggest BitTorrent tracker worldwide, counting more than 25 million registered users. The name Piratbyrån is a kind of parody related to Antipiratbyrån (The Bureau of Anti-piracy), a non-governmental content industry-based Swedish anti-piracy organization.

Diane and Marlène listening to Aquatic Invasion by Thomas Meinecke, Manifesta7, 2008.

The display of Aquatic Invasion - even though there was nothing much to see - was quite attractive and interesting: the sound was literally being broadcasted from the underground by a speaker buried in the clay. At first glance, this “scenario” seemed to have two parts: the first part related the complex cultural and political dimensions of commerce/slave ships during the 18th century, quoting among others “the poetics of the Black Atlantic world”². The African slave trade was outlawed in 1807, by a law passed jointly in the U.K. and the U.S.A. The law took effect on January 1, 1808. After that date, all US and English slave ships leaving Africa were legally pirate vessels subject to capture by the American and British navies. After a minute of listening or so, Meinecke would shift the scenario towards another important era of the afro-american diasporic culture by leaping to the early 1990s Detroit Techno scene by mentioning records produced by Drexciya and published through Underground Resistance, such as Deep Sea Dweller, Aquatic Invasion, Aquabahn and Danger Bay, which had obvious connections with the first historical part. Underground Resistance (UR) is the most militantly political Detroit techno label founded in 1989 by Jeff Mills and “Mad” Mike Banks. They define themselves as a label for a movement that wants change by sonic revolution to combat the mediocre audio and visual programming which is stagnating the minds of the people and building a wall between races and preventing world peace. The term Drexciya itself represented a myth comparable to Plato’s Atlantis, an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother’s wombs. As Meinecke specifies in his scenario, the use of mythological or sci-fi narratives existed for a long time to heighten the dramatic effect in afro-american music (from Sun Ra to Red Planet) but according to Kowdo Eshun³ Drexciya brought this extraterrestrial idea back to Earth and therefore made “the sub-Atlantic theory of the slave abduction frighteningly plausible”. If the existence of drexciyans is plausible, then one might ask itself where they might be and what they might do now?

Detail of Please join the party by Piratbyrån, Manifesta7, 2008.

Please join the party was consisting of a messy post-hippie bus parked in an old aluminium factory. The bus left Sweden for Italy (a country where the Pirate Bay is currently banned) to join Manifesta7 on July 23, 2008. During this journey, members of Piratbyrån organized a workshop in the bus, whose aim was the formulation of a new collaborative statement based on their experiences of the recent Scandinavian conflicts over copyright while making pit stops in different cities such as Malmö and Berlin. Upon arrival, they threw a party - or made an “assault”⁴ - with among others Jem Noble. After their arrival and the party, they left the bus behind with a statement and a road-movie summarizing the workshop. This project, nicknamed S23M by Piratbyrån is defined as being focused on nomadism, temporary communities, linking online & offline worlds and inclusion & exclusion. The actual system of the S23M is an old, modified and decorated city bus, slowly transporting the participants from site to site, creating a closed community during the journey. On the bus there is no Internet connection, but there are 100 mix tape cassettes, 23 special fanzines, a mystical barometer, and a game of go, just to name a few things. This bus trip is an experiment, trying to figure out what will happen when an online-based community is enacted within limited physical space, where participants must somehow spend over a week together, facing unknown settings, hierarchies and languages, and forming a provisional community. Currently, Manifesta7 is over and the Pirate Bus is on the road again. Destination: eastern countries. Piratbyrån will take part in haip 08, an art & hacking festival in Ljubljana. Then, the Pirate Bus will hit the city of Belgrade, in order to participate in the 49th October Salon: Artist-Citizen - Contextual Art Practices curated by Bojana Pejic. Apparently, the future of the Pirate Bus is an open question like the Piratbyrån itself.

Piratbyrån and Underground Resistance might use different tools to subvert different paradigms. Underground Resistance is an anti-mainstream media whereas Piratbyrån is a black hole for the mainstream media. But they are politically-engaged at the same level, locally and globally: Underground Resistance publishes music in order to spread its message all over the world while contributing to the welfare of the disenfranchised youth of Detroit’s suburbs, whereas Piratbyrån pushes the boundaries of Swedish copyright laws while freely sharing information and culture all over the Internet. As Jeffrey Adams writes about Hellblau, one of Thomas Meinecke’s recent books, “globalization requires a rethinking of all boundaries and systems, then a remixing of categories to produce hybrid identities capable of sustaining a much higher level of intersubjectivity”⁵. For the first time in history, maybe it’s high-time for the drexciyans to join up the pirates - their previous own worst enemies for centuries - to finally make the world a better place for the entire human race.

References

(1) Manifesta7, Index, Adam Budak, Anselm Franke, Hila Peleg & Raqs Media Collective, SilvanaEditorale, 2008.
(2) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy, Harvard University Press, 1993.
(3) More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun, Quartet Books, 1998.
(4) Undeground Resistance qualifies live appearances as assaults.
(5) “Thomas Meinecke. Hellblau”, World Litterature Today, Spring 2002, Jeffrey Adams.